Quote of the Day

From John Podhoretz in The Corner:

So we learn, at last, from the New York Times, that Robert Novak called Karl Rove and said he heard Joseph Wilson's wife, who was NOT a clandestine agent at the time, worked for the CIA. To which Rove replied -- of the women who was NOT a clandestine agent at the time and who he almost surely had no reason to know had at some point in the previous years BEEN a clandestine agent -- "I heard that too."

This surely qualifies as one of the "hey, big whoop" stories of all time. And I am not saying this because I am some partisan gunslinger. Simple fairness says that an official called by a journalist who volunteers a piece of gossip and then responds, "I heard that too," is not retailing a piece of incendiary information intended to destroy lives and place CIA assets in harm's way.

And I'm going to be blunt here. Anybody who says different has an agenda that has nothing whatever to do with Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, or much of anything else besides doing damage to the Bush administration and character-assassinating Karl Rove.